Step 1: Listen to your older brother when he hands you a joint and tells you not to smoke it alone. Find two friends to smoke it with in the woods behind the high school before the ninth-grade dance. When you get to the end of the joint, eat the roach. Twenty minutes later, when you freak out in the high school lobby because it’s your first time being high, and you hate it, call your father. Your friend, who doesn’t hate being high, will press down on the receiver just as you panic and tell your father to come pick you up. Start to cry. It will be more like a fake whine, because for some reason, you can’t seem to real cry when you are high. Run back to the bathroom for the sixth time in thirty minutes to make sure that you can still recognize your own face. You’ll want to fess up. Before you do, find someone that you know for sure has smoked pot before, and ask them what being high is supposed to feel like. This will not be helpful. Because even in the midst of your marijuana haze, you know that the person you asked is most likely also high and therefore an unreliable source. Find a police officer. His job is to keep kids from coming into the dance drunk or high. As you are about to confess what you did in the woods and then beg the officer to call an ambulance, someone at the front door will announce that your father is there to pick you up. Ignore the puzzled looks. Sit in the back seat with your friends, instead of the empty seat up front. If your mother likes drinking wine in her recliner while watching the Red Sox game, it will be easy to slip past her. But do so with caution. If she finds out that you smoked pot and that you got the joint from your older brother, there will be two people angry at you. Spend the rest of the night in your bed praying to God that you will be back to normal by morning. 

Step 2: Swear off pot forever.   

Step 3: At the next dance, a month later, you will feel stoned again. But you are not. You’re having your first anxiety attack. You won’t know that then. Don’t listen to your friends when they say, “You’re fiiiiiiiine,” because this time, they’re drunk. While the dance circle starts to form for Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive,” slip out of the cafeteria and into a first-floor classroom. Climb through the open window and let yourself land softly on the grass. Sprint across the front lawn, across the busy street and straight to your sister’s house. Tell her that the dance was boring. Do not tell her or anyone else about feeling stoned when you didn’t smoke pot. She’ll think you’re nuts. Maybe you are. The next day, when your mother asks why you went to your sister’s house during the dance, tell her you didn’t feel good. It won’t be a lie. Anxiety attacks do not feel good. 

Step 4: Two years later. This time, on the morning of the dance, ask your friend, who is a senior and has a car and a not-so-secret crush on you, to meet you in the courtyard during seventh period study. Before then, go to the gym. Get a pass from the gym teacher to give to the study hall teacher that says you are making up a gym class during study period. Your gym teacher will not notice (a) that you don’t need to make up a gym class (you never miss gym), and (b) that you don’t show up for the alleged make-up class. In the courtyard during seventh period, hand your friend two crumpled dollar bills, three quarters, a dime and four nickels. Give him a wink, which he will understand to mean a six-pack of Haffenreffer. He will also know to wedge the beer between two rocks in the shallow stream behind the middle school where it will stay cool until you get there. 

Step 5: Get your father to drive you and your friend to the dance. If he questions why he’s dropping you off at the middle school instead of the high school, remind him, with enough assurance to suggest he should already have this information, that you are going to a basketball game first.  He might be suspicious, especially if one of your six older siblings has already tried this tactic. Smile. Blow him a kiss. Tell him you love him. As soon as he stops the car, get out, before he asks anything else. 

Step 6: Walk casually toward the front door of the middle school and wait for your father’s taillights to fade. Run as fast as you can around to the back of the school, through the woods and straight to the stream. The cardboard case will be soggy. Make sure that no one is around before you wrangle the bottles out from between the rocks. Pass three to your friend. Keep three for yourself. The first few sips will taste like skunk. This could mean one of two things: either the six pack was in fact sprayed by a skunk while sitting in the stream for six hours, or it’s true what the older kids claim—Haffenreffer has that taste. Don’t worry. After you fight down the first one, the skunk taste will be less offensive. After the third, especially if you ran six miles at track practice that day and skipped dinner, your head will feel fuzzy and your limbs will be numb. So will your anxiety. 

Step 7: Chew three pieces of Bubble Yum on the quarter mile walk from the middle school to the high school. When you walk by the woods (where you ate the roach), do not accept an invitation to smoke pot from a senior. Your friend will, and she will regret it. Spit out your large wad of gum before you get to the front door. Chaperones are not stupid. When your friend starts dancing in the doorway to “Rapper’s Delight,” distance yourself. You’re drunk, but she is drunk and stoned now and louder than usual. Direct her past the school principal (even though Mr. Smith is her “main man” at the moment) and bring her straight to the bathroom. While she throws up in the stall, remove your comb from the left back pocket of your Levis and run it though your feathered hair—three times on each side. Apply a sixth layer of strawberry kissing potion. Your friend will be fine once she gets it all out. 

Step 8: The football captain will come in sometime during the second-to-last song. He is not from your school, but he’s cute. And drunk. When he asks you to slow dance to Donna Summer’s “Last Dance,” say yes, even though your beer buzz is starting to fade, and anxiety could attack at any minute. This is the last song and your last chance to dance with your crush. Less than a minute into the song, he will kiss you—a long, full tongue kiss that will feel good. When the dance ends, walk out of the school with him, even if he doesn’t ask you to. He will kiss you again in a dark corner outside of the high school. During that kiss (thank God you don’t know enough about kissing yet to close your eyes), you will spot your father’s blue Buick. Make a run for it. Not because you are afraid of what the captain of the football team might do to you, but because of what your father will do to him if he catches you two mid-kiss. 

Step 9: Drink at least three beers before every high school dance from now on. 

Step 10: Years later, when your oldest daughter asks you to drive her and her friends to their first high school dance, say yes. When she sits in the back seat with her friends, leaving the front seat empty, it will have nothing to do with being drunk or stoned. She is nervous. Nervous about dancing in front of her classmates. Nervous about being asked to dance by a boy. Or not. Nervous that the older kids will come in drunk and cause trouble. Enjoy her innocence, even though, at this moment, you are as nervous as she is. Shake off the thought of her standing on the sidelines during her favorite slow song. Set aside your fear that she, like you, might be afraid of being apart from you for four hours on a Friday night. Fight the urge to fix her feelings. The thought will cross your mind to help her, to explain to her how drinking three beers behind the middle school got you through your high school dance jitters. But don’t.

Kassie Rubico’s work has appeared in The Solstice Literary Journal, Pithead Chapel, Chicken Soup for the Soul, Guide to Kulcher Creative Journal, Insight Academic Journal, Parnassus Literary Journal, the anthology River Muse, Tales of Lowell and the Merrimack Valley, and Toska Literary Magazine.  She received a Master of Arts in Creative Writing and Literature at Rivier College and an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Pine Manor College. She has taught writing and literature at various colleges and is currently teaching in the Changing Lives Through Literature program. Kassie lives in Cambridge, Ma.